When RAG Is Worth the Complexity for SMB Teams.

Retrieval-augmented generation is worth the complexity when your business depends on changing documentation, policies, or operational knowledge that cannot be maintained safely through prompting alone.

For a lot of SMB teams the honest answer is 'not yet'. A well-structured workflow engine with a few prompts will carry you further than a half-built RAG system that nobody owns.

This post is the triage framework I use on the first call: the three signals that say 'yes, build retrieval', and the questions that almost always reveal a workflow problem pretending to be a search problem.

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